Eight Chattanooga Volkswagen workers have filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board saying they were misled or coerced into signing union cards.

Written by

G. Chambers

Williams III

Eight Chattanooga Volkswagen workers have filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board saying they were misled or coerced into signing cards requesting union representation at the plant.

They filed the charges against the United Auto Workers union through the NRLB’s Atlanta office with the assistance of attorneys from the Washington, D.C.-based National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. The workers were not immediately identified.

The foundation has been actively opposing attempts by the UAW to organize the 2,500 Volkswagen hourly workers through the so-called card-check process, through which a union may be recognized by a company simply by obtaining signatures of more than 50 percent of the workforce.

UAW officials said recently that they now have cards signed by a majority of the workers at the plant, although the union declined to say how many have signed. A majority can be as few as 50 percent plus one, the UAW said.

The union wants Volkswagen to recognize it as the exclusive bargaining agent for the Chattanooga workers based on the majority signing cards, rather than calling for a vote on representation.

But the right-to-work foundation and others opposed to the UAW’s recognition are demanding a vote, and say that many employees were tricked into signing cards, or signed them under duress.

The workers who filed the complaint say they were told by UAW organizers “that a signature on the card was to call for a secret ballot unionization election,” the foundation said.

“They also allege other improprieties in the card-check process, including using cards that were signed too long ago to be legally valid,” the group said.

Workers also have had problems reclaiming their signed cards from the union, said Mark Mix, the foundation’s president.

“Despite making it so easy to sign union ‘cards’ at the workplace, UAW union officials are now demanding that workers go to the union office to exercise their right to reclaim their cards,” Mix said. “This case underscores how card-check unionization schemes make it easy to check in, but impossible to check out.”

The complaints ask the NLRB “to order UAW union officials to cease and desist from demanding recognition based upon the tainted cards,” the foundation said.

Under federal law, Volkswagen management can either accept the union based on the signed cards, or call for a secret ballot of the workers. The company has indicated recently that it won’t decide the matter for several months, and that it most likely would require a vote to certify the union.

The automaker and the UAW have been in talks at Volkswagen’s headquarters in Germany about setting up a so-called works council – similar to what the company has in its other plants worldwide – that allows blue- and white-collar employees to address their concerns about the workplace with managers. Under U.S. law, however, formal union recognition is required for such a process to be implemented, the UAW and labor experts have said.